Joe Sacco Biography

Joe Sacco is a Maltese national living in Portland, Oregon, where he works as a cartoonist and journalist. Sacco graduated from the University of Oregon with a bachelor's degree in journalism in 1981. He returned to Malta two years later, when he released his first professional cartooning work (a series of romantic comics). From 1985 to 1986, he co-edited and co-published Portland Permanent Press, a monthly comics journal that ran for 15 issues and featured early work by such cartoonists as John Callahan and J.R. Williams. Sacco came to Los Angeles in 1986 to work for Fantagraphics Books, where he edited the news section of the trade journal The Comics Journal and created the satirical comic monthly Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy. Sacco traveled the world from 1988 to 1992, making six issues of his own comic book Yahoo for Fantagraphics Books while doing so. He returned to Malta for a half-year, then he spent a few months touring Europe with a rock band (an event he documented in the Yahoo #2 story "In the Company of Long Hair"). In 1996, Sacco received the coveted American Book Award for Palestine. Christmas with Karadzic, his first post-Palestine piece, was published in Zero Zero (#15), the premiere alternative comics anthology. The tale was included in a large profile on Sacco in The New York Times in June 1999, and it helped launch his next major work, Safe Area Gorazde. (It was later included in the book War's End.) Sacco was commissioned by Art Spiegelman, the then-comix editor of Details magazine, to cover the Bosnian War Crime Trials in the Hague, Netherlands, in 1998. His six-page narrative was regarded as one of the finest pieces of journalism in the magazine's history, and Sacco's second comic was quickly commissioned. Sacco was sent on tour again with R.L. Burnside, one of the finest living Mississippi bluesmen, the second time around (Sacco is a great aficionado of classic American blues). The strip was first published in the May 2000 edition, with a cover date of May 2000. Sacco completed his first major follow-up to Palestine in 2000, a 240-page exploration of a small Muslim enclave in Bosnia called Gorazde (titled Safe Area Gorazde: The War In Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995) based on Sacco's recent travels to the war-torn region (titled Safe Area Gorazde: The War In Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995). With substantial publicity from TIME magazine, The New York Times, NPR, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and scores of other media, the book got the greatest attention of any of Sacco's works to date. Sacco was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in April 2001 to assist him to continue his work. In 2003, he released The Fixer, a visual journalism piece set in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as a follow-up to Safe Area Gorazde. He worked as a staff cartoonist for The Washington Monthly for a year in 2004, producing a series of two-page satiric-political strips. But I Like It, a compilation of Sacco's rock & roll and blues-themed strips, was published by Fantagraphics Books in 2006, and Palestine was gathered for the first time in hardcover in a new Special Edition in 2007, along with all-new introductory materials. A similar Special Edition of Safe Area Gorazde will be released in 2011. In 2009, Sacco's 40-page comics narrative about Chechen refugees in Ingushetia was included in the anthology I Live Here, a benefit book for Amnesty International. Sacco's most recent significant work is Footnotes in Gaza, a journalistic and historical account of the southern Gaza Strip, which was released by Metropolitan Books in early 2010 and won the Ridenhour Book Prize in March 2010.

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